ST. LOUIS — A rare genetic liver disease that afflicts 100,000 Americans has evaded treatment by scientists and doctors for decades.
Now, after 29 years of research, a St. Louis University scientist and his team are on the cusp of a solution. Read the full article in the St. Louis-Dispatch.
A recent study found that fecal microbiota-based screening may help detect early-stage pancreatic cancer.
Researchers reported that fecal metagenomic classifiers performed significantly better than saliva-based classifiers in identifying patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. It was the top story in gastroenterology last week. Read more in Healio.
Researchers at Keck Medicine of USC say the established waiting list inclusion/exclusion criteria warrant a closer look.
Anew USC study shows that liver transplant patients with established alcohol abuse issues prior to transplantation can do as well as, or better than, others who receive new livers — a finding that challenges longstanding selection criteria.
“The assumption has been that liver failure patients who continue to use alcohol are poor transplant candidates because they aren’t motivated to take care of the donor organ,” said senior author Brian Lee, a liver transplant hepatologist at Keck Medicine of USC. “However, that view is not supported by the data.” Read more from USC News.
Prenatal environmental exposure to mixtures of endocrine-disrupting chemicals was associated with a higher risk for liver injury in children, a prospective cohort study found.
In the study of over 1,000 European mother-child pairs, the likelihood of liver injury was 44-121% higher among children with prenatal exposure to organochlorine pesticides, perfluoroalkyl substances, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and metals, reported Damaskini Valvi, MD, MPH, PhD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and colleagues. Read more in MedPage Today.
LONDON — Patients who received a liver transplant had significantly reduced antibody and T-cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination compared with healthy controls, according to research presented at the International Liver Congress.
“Emerging data have demonstrated suboptimal immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in immunosuppressed cohorts,” Thomas Marjot, a clinical research training fellow at the Oxford Liver Unit at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and colleagues wrote. Read more in Healio.
LONDON — Early liver transplantation within 7 days of listing was linked to improved 90-day and 1-year survival among patients with grade 3 acute-on-chronic liver failure, according to data presented at the International Liver Congress.
“Currently, the ideal time frame between listing and liver transplantation to achieve optimal patient outcome in [grade 3 acute-on-chronic liver failure] is not known,” Joseph J. Alukal, MD, of Platinum Hospitalists and Spring Valley Hospital Medical Center in Nevada, told Healio. Read more in Healio.
It allows donor livers to be held for days—significantly longer than the standard now–and even treated if they are damaged.
A patient who received a donated liver that had been stored for three days in a new type of machine that mimics the human body is healthy one year on from surgery, according to a study in Nature Biotechnology. The technology could significantly increase the number of livers suitable for transplant, the authors claim, both by enabling donor livers to be preserved for longer than the current standard and by making it possible to repair organs that are available but too damaged to transplant as is.
Read more in MIT Technology Review.
The GW Transplant Institute is the newest facility in the District to offer liver transplants.
The George Washington University Transplant Institute’s Liver Transplantation Program and surgeons Stephen Gray and Lynt Johnson recently completed the institute’s first liver transplant.
For the inaugural transplant, the surgical team was faced with a multi-organ procedure, replacing both the patient’s liver and kidney. Read the full story in GW Today.
A patient who underwent transplant with a liver that was preserved for 3 days outside of the body using warm machine perfusion was healthy and leading a normal life at 1 year, according to researchers from Switzerland.
The recipient experienced only minimal graft injury with normal bilirubin levels and a small release of liver enzymes within the first week after receiving the graft via ex situ normothermic preservation (peak alanine transaminase [ALT] 138 UL-1 and peak aspartate aminotransferase [AST] 309 UL-1), reported Pierre-Alain Clavien, MD, of University Hospital Zurich, and colleagues. Read more in MedPage Today.
Doctors in Switzerland have successfully removed a cancer patient’s damaged liver before transplanting it back into his body after having treated the organ in a machine for three days.
The multidisciplinary Liver4Life team at the University Hospital Zurich (USZ) has claimed that the procedure is the first of its kind in the world and they credited their in-house perfusion machine with making the feat possible. Read the full story in Newsweek here.